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Can you I.D. this one, please?

Hi there
First posting, apologies for whatever I'm bound to do as a newbie....

A friend of mine sez...he was offline for about 3 months, got back on a month ago and started weeding out accumulated e-mails. He had the preview window open on his mail application and thinks that might be the way the problem got into his computer.

He has some kind of a redirector, or hijacker, or whatyoumaycallit. Characteristics are that Norton can't scan the computer, and Adaware actually activates the thing. What it does is take him to a casino site. Apparently the problem is so pervasive he cannot use the computer. He is talking about fixing the problem "when I can take a day at it."

SURELY it can't be that opaque!

I looked at the Symantec site briefly, but this is not apparently one of the most recent afflictions, or else that is not the right place to be looking. I'm supposing if it can be identified, there is a fix for it.

then, boot the affected system to Safe Mode with networking, install Spybot and HijackThis.
Update and run Spybot and remove all the bad stuff. It will probably require a reboot to complete, so let the program continue to work after the reboot. This could take as long as an hour.

Run HijackThis and check for stuff left over. You can post the results on this site and get some good feedback of where to go next.

He says he has run both Spybot and Adaware. Of course, if he was offline for 3 months, the definitions would be out of date. As I said, he says Adaware actually triggers the thing. But I've been reading about HijackThis, and will download it for him. Thanks for the offer of help.